January 9, 2024 • 51 mins
Tune in today to listen to the amazing story of Colorado River guide Kenton Grua's wild 277 mile record-breaking speed run down the center of the Grand Canyon.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with
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Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right to Our new live show for twenty twenty
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Speaker 1 (00:30):
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Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Life is a highway. I want to arrive in all
night long, not again down the.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
River Canadian legend Tom broke off. That's right. No, it's
not right.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
But hey, we want to welcome yet another new writer
that's helping us out. Welcome Anna, because Anna helped us
with this and Anna Green and I thought this. She
did a really good job. And we hope Ana can
write some more stuff for us in the future. And
(01:40):
I could have sworn this was a listener suggestion, and
I looked and I just could not find it. So
if someone suggested that we do a show on a
gentleman named Kenton Grua who was a Grand Canyon river guide,
pretty remarkable person, then I'm really sorry because I really
I looked and looked there em but I just couldn't
find it. So that was nice. Yeah, if you want
(02:03):
to write in and say, hey, that was me, I'll
check it against my records and we'll give you a
future shot out.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Also, I got to give Anna the coronation. You ready,
that's right? All right?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Welcome aboard the old mouth wornon.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
So we're talking Kent and grewa never heard of this
person before in my life until I started researching this person,
this man, this legend actually really Yeah, he's especially if
you spend much time hanging out with Grand Canyon riverfolk,
you will you will hear stories of Kent and Grua,
(02:40):
although apparently not from him while he was alive. He's
supposedly very humble as far as his own accomplishments go.
But if you if you talk to one of his friends,
you would probably get some thrilling stories out of them
because he did some pretty interesting stuff along that Colorado River.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Absolutely, And we also want to shout out a book
that both Anna and we and we used. Kevin Fodarco
wrote a book called The Emerald Mile about this river run,
this record breaking timed river run down the Grand Canyon River,
Colorado River, and I knew the name, and then I
(03:19):
remember that I watched this great documentary from nat GEO
called Into the Canyon and Kevin Fodarco was one of
the guys. He and a guy named Pete McBride hiked
almost seven hundred and fifty miles from one end of
the canyon to the other and made this really gorgeous,
gorgeous documentary so I highly recommend Into the Canyon as
(03:40):
well as the book The Emerald Mile and Big thanks
to everything that Kevin Foderco does in terms of raising
awareness for the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Like, think about that, man, that's so many miles you
would have to get a new pair of shoes. At
some point in the middle of that.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I think they did you have to take they I
think they bailed on an attempt and then came back
and did it or something I can't remember, but just
gorgeous photography and really good stuff. The Grand Canyon is
just a truly a magical place. If you've never been there,
just go. It's one of those places that were like, yeah,
I've seen pictures and stuff, but it's one of the
(04:17):
place one of the few places that where I truly
understood the meaning of bread taking. Like I actually literally
got physically short of breath when I first stood there
on that rim.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Like you had a panic attack.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
No, it was just truly breathtaking. It's really really just
you gotta go, you gotta do it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Have you been, Yes, I have. I've been to the
North Rim. I didn't ride a burrow or anything like that,
but I did look down and get to see the
whole thing from that wooded, forested north Rim. That is
not like what you think of when you think of
the Grand Canyon. It's like just a whole other side
of it. It's really neat.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I did have a panic attack, That's why I couldn't
breathe because I was looking over into it. I'm like,
I'm this is I can't do this. But yeah, it's
pretty pretty neat for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, I've never been down to the river. My friend
Brett and I hiked down there's I don't know, I'm
not sure how far down it is, but we hiked
down to there's this one sort of area where you
can hike down to and hang out for a bit
if you don't want to go down all the way,
and then hike back out and young in shape Chuck.
That hike out was one of the toughest things I've
(05:25):
ever done.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Because you're basically just going up right.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Up, up, up up up up in the heat. Heat. Heat.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Oh wow. So back to Kent and Grua. He was
somebody who could hike up the sides of the canyon
up out of it because he did that a lot,
mostly because he spent a lot, essentially his entire adult
life in the Grand Canyon along the Colorado River, and
if you wanted to go see his family or friends
(05:52):
see a movie, that's what he had to do. He
had to hike out of the Grand Canyon to go
do those things. So he was, from every thing I saw,
extraordinarily fit but also kind of at one with the canyon.
If anybody could be, he was definitely one of those people.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, for sure. He was born in Salt Lake City
in nineteen fifty and was really big into snow skiing
until he was twelve years old when his family, because
of business his father started a trucking company, moved to Vernal, Utah.
At the time, there was no skiing in Vernal and
so his dad said, hey, kiddo, you're twelve, you'd love
(06:36):
to be outdoors in adventure, so let's go on a
rafting trip. And they went to the Yampa River for
his birthday and kitt and Grua was like, this is
where it's at. I love river rafting. So pops bought
him a army surplus raft and he, as a young kid,
started taking these little solo rafting trips. And that's kind
(06:57):
of where he learned how to navigate rivers. Initially he
got the river bug. He totally got the river bug.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
A few years later, he was going to study mechanical
engineering at the University of Utah, and during winter break
of freshman year, he was offered a job working for
Hatch River Expeditions, river boating outfit along the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon. And he said, so long college,
I'm going to go do this. And the job was
(07:27):
even just patching boats, like it wasn't even as a
river guide. But that's how much he'd loved spending time
not just on the river but specifically the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon itself. Yeah, but because of his
natural talent and his just complete passion for the job,
he became river guide within just a few months of
his first job there.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Absolutely, so he's now taking an adventuresome tourist through the
Grand Canyon down the river. He got another job after
that at Grand Canyon Expeditions for a little while and
met a really important person in his life. There, a
mentor in some way as far as conservationism god named
Martin Litton l I T t O N who was
(08:12):
starting his own company, his own expedition company, and Litton
was about he was all about just preserving the not
just the Grand Canyon, but just all of nature, and
was just sort of ashamed of what humankind had done
to nature. And in fact, the boat that grewa would
(08:33):
eventually pilot down the Colorado River for that record breaking run.
It was called the Emerald Mile. These boats Linton had,
he would name them after natural wonders that had been
destroyed by humans as a reminder. And this apparently the
Emerald Mile was a stretch of old growth redwoods in
California that were clear cut in the sixties. So he
(08:56):
named this wooden dory, this boat that you paddle with
oars after that stretch of redwoods.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, and no Dori in particular. For the most part,
people at the time, and I think still today, were
going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on
these expedition tours in rubber boats like zodiacs, like motorized
boats that you could bump up against rocks all day
and they were probably going to be fine.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
That's Some of them were regular boats.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
What do you mean regular like a pontoon.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, Like in the early days, they were just like,
I saw something that looked like old wooden Chris crafts.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Oh wow, okay, wow, that's kind of cool talk about
doing it.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
So the dory itself, though, it was originally like a
fishing boat that Europeans, I think the Portuguese were the
ones who really kind of perfected it would take out
on the ocean, so they were like sea worthy row
boats basically, and they eventually made their way to New
England where whalers would take them out, and then Martin
Linton got his hands on them for the Grand Canyon
(09:58):
because he was just like you you experience the Colorado
River in a dory in ways that you can't possibly
in a raft, let alone a motorized draft. So there
it's like a purposefully old timey antique way of going
down the Colorado River. And they still use dories today
as a matter of fact, some outfits too.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, and Greua was like, this thing is amazing, because
you know, he wanted, as we'll see, he really enjoyed
getting down that river fast and this the dory is
like they won't obviously, because they're made of wood, they
won't bounce off a rock like a raft will. But
they're much more able to be steered, they handle a
lot better, they're much more I don't know if lithe
(10:40):
is the right word, but you can motor down that
river in a dory better than you can in a
raft if you're into speed and churning.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Sure, but a lot of the most of the dory
expeditions use ors their road, right. Oh yeah, So the
other thing about it that you mentioned is that like
it won't handle bumping against rocks like a raft will.
They're much more fragile, much less forgiving than a rubber raft,
which means you have to be that much more experienced
(11:11):
and have that much greater ability to take a dory
down the Colorado River than you would like a raft.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, and you know, they can get dinged up a
little as I kind of thought at first, like you
hit a rock with one of these and you're sinking immediately.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
This explosion catches fire, right.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Exactly, And I'm sure that can happen. But as as
you will see, you know they can. They can get
bumped up a little bit, and you know they're pretty hardy.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I think, yeah, no, for sure, but it's just some
of those rapids can be pretty rough on the old boat.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Grua was in love with dories just like Martin Linton was,
and he came on Linton's company, Green Canyon Dories and
began piloting a dory called the Chattahoochie. He did that
for like ten years down the Colorado River. He made
nearly one hundred trips, which, by my estimation, that's almost
(12:07):
half of the days between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen
seventy nine. When he made those hundred trips he spent
on the Colorado River. That's a lot of time on Colorado.
That's exactly what he wanted to do. He could not
have been happier. He chose this life for himself and
he just did it. He made it work, and he
became an expert on the Colorado River as it runs
(12:29):
through the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Totally like reading this, I got very jealous of his life.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah. I was looking at some of the dory expeditions
they have and I was like, man, that's amazing. Then
it's like eighteen days. I said, no, I'm not going
to do that. Like, are there helicopters that you can
lower in and do a couple of days and then
come out. No, there's not apparently.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Well sadly, there are helicopter trips that they will take
you down and land you on a big plateau. That's
one of the things I learned from that documentary that
Fiderco was in was they were trying to raise awareness
for these you know, they were trying to build some
big like hotel basically like halfway down the canyon, and
all these people were fighting it, seeing like you can't
(13:13):
do that.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
You can't turn this into.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
A place where people can get rich, people can get
helicoptered in and stay in a five star resort.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Like no, no, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
First of all, I felt like a jackass before. Now
I really feel like a jackass.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
But some of you were talking about getting dropped off
to Row. Sure, like ziplining out like a ranger.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Right, But I mean like walking down from a resort
to go row for a couple of days.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Maybe that's as pretty good.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But the.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Kind of upshot of what you're saying is a good
analogy from what I understand. To compare rafting or boating
down the Colorado River these days would be like going
on an expedition to Everest. It is nothing like it
used to be. Yeah, even twenty thirty, forty years ago,
it's just gotten so much easier. There's so much money
(14:06):
being thrown at this now, it's just not even a
challenge any longer. It's like a posh vacation for people
who like to act like their adventurers. And I'm saying
that I'm not going to climb Everest, so I can't
really be critical, but I'm saying comparing it to how
it originally started, when these outfits were first created in
(14:27):
like the forties, fifties, sixties, it's just nothing like that today.
It's far more commercialized, I guess, is what I'm trying
to say.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, so in the meme how it started, how it's
going to be a person like bleeding from the head
and spitting a river water out of their mouth, and
then another one with a dude holding a martini as
he goes down the river.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Exactly, all right, I said.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We took a break, oh yeah, and we come back
and we talk a little bit more about Kenton Grua
the man. All right, as promised, We're going to tell
(15:19):
you a little bit more about the personality of Kent
and Grua. He was quite an adventurer like you said
was just in love with nature, and in particular the
Grand Canyon in that river. His nickname was the Factor.
If you ever read anything you're going to see him,
probably called Kenton the Factor Grua and that was because
apparently he was just like this larger than life personality
(15:42):
and like anytime he was a part of something he
had some sort of influence on it, he was a factor,
and thus the Factor.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Yeah, we'll put he was also very fond of pot
and drinking liquor while he was working on the trail
and after, I guess after rowing for the day, sitting
on a beach, Yeah, you'd probably light up what one
might call it.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Split back then might be a doobie for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
And I'll bet it just gave you a headache instantly.
But he also is a little kind of fashion conscious,
you can say. Anna points out that he would wear
cutoff levies that look cool, especially if you're barefoot and
you have long hair in your stone. But if you're
like falling the water, it takes like a week for
(16:31):
those things to dry out. So long story short, Kent
and Gruel was very frequently chafed on the inside of
his thighs.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Right he was not at all man.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
He was five foot six, but you know, had an
outsized personality and sense of adventure. I guess there was
one story that he was on one expedition and they
drank all the booze, so he hiked all the way
out of the Grand Canyon to go get more booze,
hike back in.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yeah, that's just one story about Kent and grew, but
it definitely drives the point home. Like he liked booze,
but he was also willing to physically exert himself at
the drop of a hat. So he was a tough
dude essentially, But he was also supposedly really kind and
gentle with the tourists that he took down the river. Yeah,
(17:23):
he was well known for that. But he was also
known for being very opinionated about how the river should
be navigated, how an expedition should be run, and so
he would be more than likely to butt heads with
some of the other river guides that he worked with,
but that didn't rub off toward the passengers, which I
think makes him a pro.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
I'd say, yeah, absolutely, And you know we're going to
build up sort of story wise to the record breaking
river run. But he did some pretty remarkable things before that,
one of which was to hike the entire length of
the Grand Canon from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs.
(18:04):
He read a book in nineteen sixty eight that was
a backpacker named Colin Fletcher who did that hike, well
sort of, we'll see the man who walked through Time
was the book and he said, I'm the first person
to hike the entire link of the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
And Grew was like, no, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
You hiked the canyon within the National Park System. But buddy,
that ain't all of the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
The guy went, what.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So I'm going to do it? And he did.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He tried a couple of times, he tried the first time,
and you know, this is two hundred and seventy seven
miles as the crow flies. Yeah, like I mentioned before,
when Faderka did it, they hiked seven hundred and fifty miles.
Because you can't just walk a straight line, there's things
you just can't navigate around, so you're having to hike,
you know, three times as much or at least two
(18:55):
and a half times as much as the length of
the canyon to complete that high.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's a nuts and he did it first time he
tried it. Remember I said he liked to run around
barefoot and cut off Levi's oh, yeah, well this he
realized he was going on a very long hike, so
he went to the trouble of buying himself some leather
moccasins to hi kid. Those lasted very short time before
he started wearing through them and actually cut his foot
on a cactus started to get infected. He's like, I
(19:20):
should probably stop now.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
That surprised me that he would. I mean, that's a mistake.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
I think he knew that that wasn't going to work.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
You know, I don't know that that's true. Like he
was capable of making mistakes, for sure. He's also capable
of evolving his opinions and understandings about things. And he
wasn't so dumb that he kept going until he died, right, Yeah,
you know that was nineteen seventy two, I think. Yeah,
four years later, he's like, I'm going to do this different.
I'm going to not only wear work boots instead of moccasins. Smart,
(19:54):
move out of the gate.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
He scouted the whole route in advanced and supply caches
along the route, so that he could travel as light
as possible, and that's when he set out that second time,
and that's when he was successful. Hiking almost six hundred
miles is the route that he took.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Wow, that is amazing. I think he if you average
it out, he was averaging like almost seventeen mile a
day clip, which is super fast. I mean, when I've
done hikes and I'm really hauling it, if I get
ten miles in a day, that's like a really long,
hard day. And he was in the Grand Canyon, arduous
(20:38):
conditions in the seventies when gear was not like it
is now and averaging close to seventeen miles a day,
which is nuts. It took him thirty six days to
complete the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
I can barely get seventeen miles in a day in
a helicopter, let alone hiking. So yeah, thirty six days
to hike almost six hundred miles. And this is again
it's not a straight line flat like there's up and
down and over and it's what he did was very significant,
and he became the first person on record at least
(21:09):
to have hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon,
not just the National Park, the whole Grand Canyon. And
so whenever you're hearing about people boating through the Grand
Canyon on the Colorado River, what they're talking about is
that same length, the whole geographical Grand Canyon from Lee's
Ferry to Grand Wash cliffs.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
All right, so let's talk a little bit about that
river run that you just described. You know, from point
to point. The very first expedition down that Colorado River
was by a guy, a Civil War veteran with one arm,
named John Wesley Powell in eighteen sixty nine. It took
ninety eight days at that point and pretty much wrecked
(21:58):
the crew. I mean it was by the time they
got there, they were starving. Was it was a very
very tough ride in eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Can I just say one thing about that expedition, Chuck? Sure,
Three of them, three members of the expedition said nuts
to this, like we're giving up, and set off on
foot and we're never heard from again. And they left
two days before this expedition finally reached its destination. They
just didn't know that they were that close to the end,
(22:26):
and they left and died. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, that's sad.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, but they were the first Europeans on record to
have circumnavigated the Colorado River through the entire Grand Canyon,
and it was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, that's like the old mine in apocalypse Now. Never
never get off the gd.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Boat, right, the gosh darn boat.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
In the case of apocalypse. Now, it's because there might
be a tiger in the jungle.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Right. So I saw also that this was considered the
last voyage of discovery in North America. It was a
big deal that John Wesley Powllin is his grew did this.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Then in nineteen forty nine there was a guy named
Ed Hudson who was a pharmacist who made a run
in a motor boat. So it was obviously the fastest
at the time at five days and ten minutes. And
then all of a sudden, motor boats and regular boats
started attempting these speed runs. People are trying to, you know,
(23:23):
break previous records. You know, depending on how adventurous you were.
I guess it depends on whether or not you want
to use some motor But obviously the berets are off
to the people who didn't use the motor. Yeah, I'm
sure it was still hard but it ain't like paddling,
you know.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
No, Ed Hudson, a pharmacist in nineteen forty nine, he
did it in like five days and ten minutes using
a motor boat. Jim and Bob Rigg I think two
years later, said nuts to the motor boat. We're going
to not only go down the same path that John
Wesley Powell did in eighteen sixty nine that nearly killed
(24:01):
him without a motor we're going to break Ed Hudson's
motor based record.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And they did actually, yeah, fifty two hours.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And this was at a time in the fifties when
like a tourist trip, that same tourist trip and a
non motorized boat would be about three weeks. And of
course they're not trying to break a record, they're trying
to show everyone a nice, good time, right exactly, probably
fairly relaxing, so it's not yeah, but some people did
(24:31):
like the slow train. The longest attempt was in seventy three,
and that took one hundred and three days. That's a
little more of my speed, I think.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
So we need to say something about the Colorado River.
As Kent and Grua knew it. He came along in
what was it, nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine, Yeah,
one hundred years exactly after John Wesley Powell Kent and
Grewa came along and took up life on the Colorado
River through the Grand Canyon. But unfortunately for Kent Grewa,
(25:00):
that was six years after the I think the Department
of the Interior created the Glen Canyon Dam, yeah, upstream
of the Grand Canyon in uh on the Colorado River,
and the Colorado River was tamed. That's the best way
to put it. It was up to the I think
the Army Corps of Engineers or whoever runs the dam
(25:21):
there at Glen Canyon to decide how much water the
Colorado River had. And before that it had been considered
the wildest river in America because the snow melt from
the mountains upstream. Depending on how how much it snowed
that year, and then how how much, how high the
(25:42):
temperatures rose, and how quickly they did that spring, that
river could turn wild in an instant because so much
water would come down from the mountains and it would
just flood the Colorado River, including some of the side canyons,
and it would make it nuts. And Kent and Grua
he knew this too, came along after that ceased, and
(26:03):
so now the Colorado was relatively mild.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, Like, if you're going to go down a river
and you want to see how you know, challenging it
might be as a rower, You're going to look at
what's called the gradient in feet per mile, And obviously
the higher the gradient, the more you know, the faster
that water's going to be. A pretty wild river can
(26:28):
have a gradient between twenty five and sixty feet per mile.
The Colorado River has a gradient of eight feet per mile.
So the actual you know, the where the river sits
and the land beneath that river, that gradient isn't too crazy.
It is the steepness of the sides of that canyon
(26:49):
is what makes it crazy. Because, like you said, when
that stuff flash floods and it hits the Colorado River,
it can move boulders, it can create you know, waves,
and when that water hits the still water, it can
create a wave like twenty to thirty feet high.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, for sure in a river. Yeah. One of the
reasons why stuff like that happens is because all that
debris and boulder create these natural dams on either side
of the river, narrowing the channel, speeding up the water,
and once you have fast water running into slow water,
all sorts of crazy stuff happens. So speaking, geographically, the
Colorado River shouldn't have rapids, but because of its situation
(27:29):
in that stretch of the Grand Canyon, it does. It
has some pretty cool rapids. And Kent and Gruin knew
how to do this, Like his job was to take
people through these rapids down this stream. But again the
river that he was on was not the same river
that John Wesley Powell had been on because of the dam.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Want to talk about the first the first attempt in nineteen.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Eighty, Yeah, I mean successful. A tip makes it sounds
like he didn't do it. He actually did set a
speed record in nineteen eighty I think how fast was
that one?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
He did him forty six hours in fifty six minutes.
He beat Jim and Bob Riggs nineteen fifty one record,
which it stood for almost thirty years.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, so he breaks the record and you would think,
you know a lot of people would say like, all right,
I did what I attempted to do, broke that record,
But Kit and grew It was like man that river
was was not fast that day, a couple of days,
and I can do this a lot faster. And he
became sort of I don't know about obsessed, if that's
(28:36):
the right word. I don't know if someone who smoked
that much weed can then get that obsessed or worked
up about anything. But he said, I know I can
do this if that like, it doesn't matter how fast
I'm rowing. Unless I have a faster river just from
the natural conditions, then I can't break that record. So
I'm gonna wait until the conditions are right. And that
(28:57):
happened in nineteen eighty three because of El Nino. It
was at the time, at least the most extreme El
Nino that had happened to that point. Caused a ton
of snow. All that snow melts at some point, and
all of a sudden, you're gonna have flooding such that
if you're measuring like a river flow, you measure it
(29:18):
in cubic feet per second. The Colorado River through the
Grand Canyon averages about twelve thousand to fifteen thousand cubic
feet per second, and that summer that June specifically, I
saw anywhere from between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand
cubic feet per second, which is, you know, up seven
(29:40):
to ten times as fast.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, that is a lot more water. Number one, it
goes a lot faster, and it changes the river. Like
the river that he was used to, the rapids, he
was used to the features that he had to circumnavigate
during a normal boating trip down the Colorado. It was
not there. They were different. They were altered by this
(30:02):
huge influx of very fast moving water. And so what
had happened is Kevin Fudarco points out in the Emerald
Mile that for the first time, probably for the only
time in his lifetime, Kent and Grua had a chance
to take on the Colorado River, the same river that
John Wesley Powell took on in eighteen sixty nine. This
(30:25):
stuff did not happen. It caught the corp of engineers
by surprise, so much so that they to keep the
Lake Powell from topping over the Glen Canyon Dam, they
were putting up plywood barriers. That's how unprepared they were
for this incredibly historic flooding. I think there was like
twenty six hundred miles of shoreline in Lake Powell. The
(30:48):
reservoir that's behind the dam, and the reservoir was rising
a foot a day, that's how much snow melt was
coming down, And so they were just releasing. According to
Arizona Central, up to a million cubic feet per second
in a release at a time. So this was flooding
the Colorado downstream. But it's the only option they had
(31:08):
to keep the dam from breaking or from being toppled,
and you know, the water coming out of control. So
it was a wild river again all of a sudden,
like it happened before. And Kent and Grew was all
about that.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
He was all about it.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
So I say, we took a break and then we'll
come back and let everyone know what happened on June
twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Okay, So Kent and Grew says, it's time. Like that
nineteen eighty record that I broke that I'm not very
happy with, I'm now going to break that record. I'm
going to take this river like I know it can
be taken. And he went to his friend Rudy Petschek,
who was at the time forty nine. Kenton would have
been thirty three. Yeah, So Rudy Petchik was like old
(32:15):
and then Steve Wren Reynolds was the other guy that
they they brought on. So the three of them decided
that they were going to take the Emerald Mile out
onto the Colorado River. And they was by the way,
okay Ren, Yeah, okay. And they went to the Park
Service and said, hey, we'd like a permit. We're gonna
(32:36):
take the Emerald Mile down the Colorado River. It's nuts
right now, isn't it. And the Park Service said, no,
you're not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, you got to get a permit to do something
like that. They said, no, Like you said, they were
trying to send people, trying to keep people off the river,
and as we'll see you later on. They even had
a ranger stationed on the river. I guess it was
Benjamin Bratt probably telling people to get out. What you
(33:07):
never saw the River wild.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
No, is that the one with Bruce Willis where he's
a cop in a boat.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Nope?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
River Wilde was Meryl Streep and David Stratham, Kevin Bacon
and John c Riley.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Isn't Kevin Bacon like a crazy homicidal serial killer is
stalking these guys?
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Not a serial killer. He's a bad guy. Though. Okay,
it's a really good movie. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
But Benjamin Bratt is a ranger that literally does what
this other ranger did is like stationed down before the
bad rapid saying get out.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
You shouldn't be here.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I just want to shout out my favorite Benjamin Bratt
fact that he was born on Alcatraz during the American
Indian Movement's occupation of Alcatraz.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Did we talk about that?
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Yeah, in our Alcatraz episode?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
And did not remember that?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Well? Also talk about it in our forthcoming Benjamin Bratt episode.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
We haven't done one on Alcatraz, have we?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yes? Dude, you sure? I believe we did one on
Alcatraz itself. And the escape from.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Alcatraz, Yeah, I do remember escape from Alcatress.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
That escape from Alcatraz one, by the way, was a
good one, all right.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
So he doesn't get the permit, so he goes back
to Martin Litton, his mentor, and he says, hey, man,
you got a lot of pull around here. I'm wondering
if you could help me out, And Linton said, sure,
I'll call up the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent himself,
Richard Marx ks not X. Did we gonna make it
(34:41):
Richard Marx to it?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
No, I just thought it would if it had been
b Richard Marx, like in his life, right before he.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Hit it big, right, and he said, he said, you
know what, it don't mean nothing. And he went, hey,
that's got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, that's right, sign on the dotted line.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
That's a good song, it is. And so Mark said,
all right, here's what I'll do.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
I will call up the rangers out there on the
river tomorrow and I'll get back to you. He didn't
get back to them, and so Litton and Grewubo said,
I guess that means we have permission, right, right, And
so they took off on June twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Yeah, eleven pm they took off. I guess under the
cover of darkness. Maybe that's the only reason I can
think of that they took off so late.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, Or maybe they just timed it so they've finished
at a certain time, or I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
I don't know either, but they did take off just
before midnight.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
That to heat.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Maybe maybe that's a great one. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Anyway,
the fact is this, they were paddling for hours in
pitch darkness because the canyons, the canyon walls of the
Grand Canyon can prevent the sunlight from hitting inside the
canyon at the river level during the day. This was nighttime,
(36:03):
and so the canyon walls were preventing any moonlight from
even getting down. So they were rafting on a river
that was flowing at about ten times its normal rate,
if not more, in the dark without the benefit of
using their eyes. So they were having to like literally
feel the vibrations in the oars to tell what was
(36:24):
coming up in which way they should go during this
nighttime paddling event that they did.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, and I mean to be sure, these were some
of the most experienced people to undertake something like this,
but that is still like it just can't be overstated
what a accomplishment this was.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Just to make it through that first night.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Yeah, especially doing it stoned wearing nothing but cut off levs.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
So they would paddle.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
There were, like I said, three of them, so they
would paddle for about fifteen to twenty minutes at a
time because it's really rigorous, tough stuff that they're doing.
I grew up, went up first and paddled first, and
they would switch off when they would get tired. They
would rest take little cat naps when they could when
they weren't paddling, obviously, and things were going pretty good
(37:13):
for the first few hours, and then they reached a
series of rapids called the Roaring twenties. That is really
tough in particular with all this water, because there's something
in rivers called I would assume people know what and
eddie is, but you might not. Eddie is like a
very calm part of a river, usually off to the
side where the water is flowing back upstream and like
(37:36):
avoid in the current. Usually it's like blocked by a
big rock or something, and it's a good place. Usually
that's where if you want to pull off and you
get out of the boat and get on land, you'll
pull off to a nice little calm eddie. But you
can also have an area where the eddie meets the rapids,
and that's called an eddie fence. I saw it described
(37:57):
as confused water. It doesn't really know which way to go,
so it's going everywhere at once, and it's just really
really unstable water. And these eddy fences were all over
the place, just like not crushing literally but just like
wreaking havoc on their boat in this trip they were taking.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, because the water, the boat's going the direction of
the water, and if the water all of a sudden
is going multiple directions, that gets telegraphed to the boat
and it makes it very difficult to move around, right.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, But they did get through that part, obviously they did.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And again they're going through the roaring twenties at night
in pitch darkness. JUSTI I just really want to make
sure everybody keeps this in mind. The other thing is
is they were taking these rapids wide open. They weren't
stopping to scout what was ahead and then getting back
in the boat and then taking it with full knowledge
of what was coming up. They just took it as
(38:51):
it came, essentially, Yeah, which is again really nuts considering
that this was not the river that they were used to.
It was the wild, raging version of the river that
they were used. It was like the Colorado on bath salts. Basically,
that's what they were taking on in the dark without
(39:12):
the benefit of eyesight.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, I think steroids is ever used bath salts.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, if you really want to drive the point home,
use bath salts. No, don't actually use basalts. I meant
in your analogy.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, they get through this on you know, experience, on instinct,
like you said, feeling their way. The sun finally comes up.
They're flying down this river. They're going through, you know,
all kinds of crazy rapids, the huge whirlpools, these big
standing waves that talked about that you know, got up
to twenty feet. I think one of the guys even
(39:46):
said pet Chick said some of them were like three
stories high. Yeah, at times. And they finally get to
Crystal Rapid, which is at mile ninety eight, and they
were worn out, like super super tired obviously. And that
is where Benjamin Bratt was stationed. Yeah, park ranger Benjamin Bratt,
(40:07):
and he said, hey, you shouldn't be paddling through here.
And also I was born on Alcatraz.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
That's a great Benjamin Bratt in person.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Uh No, he was stationed there to get if there
were any tourist boats that you know, had somehow already
been on the water, which they shouldn't have been to
begin with, because they were denying permits.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah. I didn't understand that part, you know.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I guess they were just there were some already out there,
maybe because especially if some of them were taking three weeks.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Oh got, they didn't want to ruin people's vacation.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Maybe, but they were Basically he was there basically to say, hey,
pull over, all of you tourists, get out and hike
out and boat captain and whoever else you're gonna have
to take this thing down the rest of the way,
like by yourself.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, I hope you don't like company because ts for you.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Uh, that's right. But what happened with this group.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
So they didn't what. One of the things that caused
Benjamin Bratt to be stationed there was that a commercial
rafting outfit had gotten overturned. One of the boats had
been overturned at this under normal circumstances, very tough rapid
called crystal rapids, and one person had died. I believe
(41:18):
a passenger had died. This happened like eleven hours before
the Kent and Grew and his group came along in
the Emerald Mile. They were totally out of contact with everybody,
so they had no idea this happened. And so the
reason Benjamin Bratt was there was because it was so
dangerous what they were coming up on that. Literally, their
(41:40):
lives were in danger. So when they came upon the
park ranger, Benjamin Bratt, they pretended they didn't see him.
What was cool is.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Look over there on the right, guys.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Exactly what was cool about it is that this park
ranger had been a river guide himself. He immediately recognized
two was in this boat, and he pretended he didn't
see them. Yeah, so that everybody could just kind of
go their own way and just pretend like they hadn't
seen one another, and these guys could continue on because
he said he knew immediately what they were doing because
(42:12):
of the river conditions, so he just let him go
their way. He kept an eye on them as they
went further along, though, and hit that crystal rapid and
he witnessed their boat being overturned very violently.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, this is when they hit one of those the
one that Petchick said was two to three stories high,
fliped that thing at the top. Everyone ends up in
the water. Kent and Greua was pretty okay and Petchick
was pretty okay. The boat got banged up a little bit.
I think it lost some of its bowel post, a
(42:46):
chunk out of the stern but it was still very
much operational, and Reynolds was injured. I think there was
a head injury, and as a result, he did not
do a lot of at least tough rowing after that,
he did anything at all. I figure he'd be like
Burt Reynolds in Deliverance at that point, just sort of
laying down in the middle of the canoe. But he
(43:08):
apparently would row some calmer parts. And I guess take
that with a grain of salts, because I don't think
any of it was very calm and grew and Petchick said,
all right, it's the two of us basically doing the tough,
tough rowing in one hundred degree heat, and it was.
It was real tough stuff from that point on. It
(43:29):
was already tough, but it was really really tough. But
they decided not to quit.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
No, they didn't, and that's really significant because again their
boat overturned. They Reynolds was injured, they were thrown out
of the boat violently into a whirlpool, got sucked under.
All three of them miraculously got free and then they
had to turn the boat back over upright again get
back in it. Totally exhausted at this point and decided
(43:54):
to continue on. They did that was just absolutely nuts.
Problem is is they knew the park ranger had seen them,
and so they were kind of all worried about possibly
losing their river guide licenses because again, this was a
wildcat river run. It was not sanctioned, it was technically illegal.
But they continued on. They said, we've made it this far,
(44:15):
and they kept going and gave themselves I guess a
period where they're like, okay, this is not working anymore.
We're all too exhausted. We need to take some rest.
Let's just take an hour and we'll all get some sleep,
and then we'll wake up and be refreshed and it'll
be like starting over again and new.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
And of course what happens is they sleep for three hours,
almost woke up in a panic because they had just
you know, almost killed themselves. They're exhausted, and now they're
thinking like, now we've jeopardized this record that we're trying
to get. We don't know if the river will ever
be this fast again, right, and here we slept for
three hours. So instead of taking their ball and going home,
(44:58):
taking their ore and going home, they said, now we
got to go extra fast. So at mile two thirty nine,
they get out another set of ores and someone said,
where did those even come from? And Grewa said, they
were at our feet the whole time. Dumb, dumb, And
they started rowing two at a time, so they were
(45:19):
hauling but rowing together, which obviously, you know, I don't
know if that probably doesn't double your speed, but you're
you're going much faster at that point.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, so that was They woke up at I guess
about one, because they took that rest at ten and
accidentally slept for three hours, so actually, yeah one, I
had to count it out on my fingers for a second.
And then they kept rowing and they another ten hours
later they finally reached the end, so that like they
(45:50):
had just been exerting themselves almost constantly for thirty six
hours and thirty eight minutes. That's what their final time
ended up being. So they just destroy Grewa's previous record
setting run thanks to the river being so nuts.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, he did it. The three of them did it
rather and he did not lose his license. He was
worried about that, so that's the good news. Apparently he
got a five hundred dollars fine, which he couldn't even pay,
so his lawyer negotiated community service, which he may or
may not have even done. And like you said, at
the very beginning of this, he wasn't a big braggart
(46:28):
about his own accomplishments. They kind of spoke for themselves
to him. Yeah, for sure, So he didn't really you know,
it's not like he started making the talk show circuit
or anything like that. But of course word was going
to get out people talk, and he you know, he
will always remain a legend of the Grand Canyon and
the Colorado River because of the speed run.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yeah. He died at fifty two in two thousand and two,
and he died while he was riding his mountain bike.
And I couldn't find out how. It's like that sounds
like he went over a cliff or something. Apparently he
had torn aorta somehow. They're not sure how, but he
was found laying beside his mountain bike dead and his
wife at his I believe his third wife, Michelle Grewa,
(47:12):
said this is exactly how he would have wanted to go.
So yeah, I mean, if you're going to be like
a rugged outdoorsman and you die on your mountain bike,
that's not the worst way you could go.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
No, they you know, it seemed like he was he
was just sort of laying there on his side, and
they said it looked like sort of a peaceful position.
So there there is speculation that he may have sort
of known what was going on and just sort of
laid down and you know, to be with the woods.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Right, to be with the woods. That's the new euphemism
for it, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (47:46):
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
Michelle Grew also wrote in a memorial Boatman's Quarterly, I
think that he had mellowed out some a lot actually
in his later years. Still lived the life that he lived,
but he became focused on being a dad. I think
he had three or has three kids, and it was just,
from what I can tell, an all round interesting neat dude.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
Yeah. I mean he started a conservation group, didn't he.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
He did called the Grand Canyon River Guides, that's right,
which is still around today, and that Grand Canyon Dories
was sold to an existing outfit called Oars, which gives
dory tours down the Grand Canyon still today.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Tempting.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
It tempted me too, and then I was like, again,
seventeen days is a little much and also do I
want to perish in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River?
And I decided, now I don't.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
He could just be with the woods.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
I'd just rather stay locked inside my house. Right, You
got anything else?
Speaker 3 (48:53):
No, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I just know that that's one place you will not
crash a dory into a boulder is in your house.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
It's definitely not.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well, since I said definitely not, that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Uh oh, this is cool.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
This is from someone who whose grandmother had a nice
little what do you call them?
Speaker 3 (49:16):
A mnemonic device?
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Yeah, for when you want to remember.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Something mnemonic you're thinking's a pneumatic no nomonic.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Hey, guys, stuff you should know as a staple of
my daily commute. Truly enjoy learning about common and obscure stuff.
And you've helped our trivia team, the Meerkats, claim victory
on more than one occasion.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Go Meerkats for sure.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Anyway, just finished the episode on the Wreck of the
Coast to Concordia and thought i'd share the way that
my grandmother taught me how to remember which direction was
port versus starboard. She would say, there's not much port
left in the glass like port whye y port side
being left port left in the glass. Interestingly, she was
(50:02):
not a seafaring woman nor a.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
Lover of port.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I wish I could recall the context of her telling
me this even but it's always stuck with me. And
I thought you might get a kick out of that.
Thanks for all the information and laughs. And that is
from Aaron. And I wrote Aeron back to see if
I could get report No grandma's name, but I didn't
hear back. So let's just let's just say grandmother to Aaron,
(50:27):
okay inntribute?
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Yeah, and that's it. Okay. Is that Aaron with the
A A or Aaron with the E E R? I am, oh,
thanks a lot, Aaron. That's a good one. It's at
least as good as mine that I came up with.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
But what was yours?
Speaker 1 (50:47):
There's four letters in both port and left.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
I think, Oh, think that's what it's good too.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
That's how that's what I remember. So apparently the system works.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Well, if you want to be like Aaron and improve
or try to improve upon our devices, we love that
kind of thing. You can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with
access to an airport or a car rental place that
can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the
end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and
San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right to Our new live show for twenty twenty
four is Seattle, Washington January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater,
then Portland at our Homeway from Home at Revolution Hall
the twenty fifth, and then winding it all up at
Sketchfest on the twenty six at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information,
if you want tickets, you can go to a couple
of places. You can go to our link tree at
Linktree slash sysk, and you can go to our home
on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com. Click on
the tour button and it'll take you to all of
the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets
and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Life is a highway. I want to arrive in all
night long, not again down the.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
River Canadian legend Tom broke off. That's right. No, it's
not right.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
But hey, we want to welcome yet another new writer
that's helping us out. Welcome Anna, because Anna helped us
with this and Anna Green and I thought this. She
did a really good job. And we hope Ana can
write some more stuff for us in the future. And
(01:40):
I could have sworn this was a listener suggestion, and
I looked and I just could not find it. So
if someone suggested that we do a show on a
gentleman named Kenton Grua who was a Grand Canyon river guide,
pretty remarkable person, then I'm really sorry because I really
I looked and looked there em but I just couldn't
find it. So that was nice. Yeah, if you want
(02:03):
to write in and say, hey, that was me, I'll
check it against my records and we'll give you a
future shot out.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Also, I got to give Anna the coronation. You ready,
that's right? All right?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Welcome aboard the old mouth wornon.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
So we're talking Kent and grewa never heard of this
person before in my life until I started researching this person,
this man, this legend actually really Yeah, he's especially if
you spend much time hanging out with Grand Canyon riverfolk,
you will you will hear stories of Kent and Grua,
(02:40):
although apparently not from him while he was alive. He's
supposedly very humble as far as his own accomplishments go.
But if you if you talk to one of his friends,
you would probably get some thrilling stories out of them
because he did some pretty interesting stuff along that Colorado River.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Absolutely, And we also want to shout out a book
that both Anna and we and we used. Kevin Fodarco
wrote a book called The Emerald Mile about this river run,
this record breaking timed river run down the Grand Canyon River,
Colorado River, and I knew the name, and then I
(03:19):
remember that I watched this great documentary from nat GEO
called Into the Canyon and Kevin Fodarco was one of
the guys. He and a guy named Pete McBride hiked
almost seven hundred and fifty miles from one end of
the canyon to the other and made this really gorgeous,
gorgeous documentary so I highly recommend Into the Canyon as
(03:40):
well as the book The Emerald Mile and Big thanks
to everything that Kevin Foderco does in terms of raising
awareness for the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Like, think about that, man, that's so many miles you
would have to get a new pair of shoes. At
some point in the middle of that.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I think they did you have to take they I
think they bailed on an attempt and then came back
and did it or something I can't remember, but just
gorgeous photography and really good stuff. The Grand Canyon is
just a truly a magical place. If you've never been there,
just go. It's one of those places that were like, yeah,
I've seen pictures and stuff, but it's one of the
(04:17):
place one of the few places that where I truly
understood the meaning of bread taking. Like I actually literally
got physically short of breath when I first stood there
on that rim.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Like you had a panic attack.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
No, it was just truly breathtaking. It's really really just
you gotta go, you gotta do it.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Have you been, Yes, I have. I've been to the
North Rim. I didn't ride a burrow or anything like that,
but I did look down and get to see the
whole thing from that wooded, forested north Rim. That is
not like what you think of when you think of
the Grand Canyon. It's like just a whole other side
of it. It's really neat.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I did have a panic attack, That's why I couldn't
breathe because I was looking over into it. I'm like,
I'm this is I can't do this. But yeah, it's
pretty pretty neat for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, I've never been down to the river. My friend
Brett and I hiked down there's I don't know, I'm
not sure how far down it is, but we hiked
down to there's this one sort of area where you
can hike down to and hang out for a bit
if you don't want to go down all the way,
and then hike back out and young in shape Chuck.
That hike out was one of the toughest things I've
(05:25):
ever done.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Because you're basically just going up right.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Up, up, up up up up in the heat. Heat. Heat.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Oh wow. So back to Kent and Grua. He was
somebody who could hike up the sides of the canyon
up out of it because he did that a lot,
mostly because he spent a lot, essentially his entire adult
life in the Grand Canyon along the Colorado River, and
if you wanted to go see his family or friends
(05:52):
see a movie, that's what he had to do. He
had to hike out of the Grand Canyon to go
do those things. So he was, from every thing I saw,
extraordinarily fit but also kind of at one with the canyon.
If anybody could be, he was definitely one of those people.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, for sure. He was born in Salt Lake City
in nineteen fifty and was really big into snow skiing
until he was twelve years old when his family, because
of business his father started a trucking company, moved to Vernal, Utah.
At the time, there was no skiing in Vernal and
so his dad said, hey, kiddo, you're twelve, you'd love
(06:36):
to be outdoors in adventure, so let's go on a
rafting trip. And they went to the Yampa River for
his birthday and kitt and Grua was like, this is
where it's at. I love river rafting. So pops bought
him a army surplus raft and he, as a young kid,
started taking these little solo rafting trips. And that's kind
(06:57):
of where he learned how to navigate rivers. Initially he
got the river bug. He totally got the river bug.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
A few years later, he was going to study mechanical
engineering at the University of Utah, and during winter break
of freshman year, he was offered a job working for
Hatch River Expeditions, river boating outfit along the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon. And he said, so long college,
I'm going to go do this. And the job was
(07:27):
even just patching boats, like it wasn't even as a
river guide. But that's how much he'd loved spending time
not just on the river but specifically the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon itself. Yeah, but because of his
natural talent and his just complete passion for the job,
he became river guide within just a few months of
his first job there.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Absolutely, so he's now taking an adventuresome tourist through the
Grand Canyon down the river. He got another job after
that at Grand Canyon Expeditions for a little while and
met a really important person in his life. There, a
mentor in some way as far as conservationism god named
Martin Litton l I T t O N who was
(08:12):
starting his own company, his own expedition company, and Litton
was about he was all about just preserving the not
just the Grand Canyon, but just all of nature, and
was just sort of ashamed of what humankind had done
to nature. And in fact, the boat that grewa would
(08:33):
eventually pilot down the Colorado River for that record breaking run.
It was called the Emerald Mile. These boats Linton had,
he would name them after natural wonders that had been
destroyed by humans as a reminder. And this apparently the
Emerald Mile was a stretch of old growth redwoods in
California that were clear cut in the sixties. So he
(08:56):
named this wooden dory, this boat that you paddle with
oars after that stretch of redwoods.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, and no Dori in particular. For the most part,
people at the time, and I think still today, were
going down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on
these expedition tours in rubber boats like zodiacs, like motorized
boats that you could bump up against rocks all day
and they were probably going to be fine.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
That's Some of them were regular boats.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
What do you mean regular like a pontoon.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, Like in the early days, they were just like,
I saw something that looked like old wooden Chris crafts.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Oh wow, okay, wow, that's kind of cool talk about
doing it.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
So the dory itself, though, it was originally like a
fishing boat that Europeans, I think the Portuguese were the
ones who really kind of perfected it would take out
on the ocean, so they were like sea worthy row
boats basically, and they eventually made their way to New
England where whalers would take them out, and then Martin
Linton got his hands on them for the Grand Canyon
(09:58):
because he was just like you you experience the Colorado
River in a dory in ways that you can't possibly
in a raft, let alone a motorized draft. So there
it's like a purposefully old timey antique way of going
down the Colorado River. And they still use dories today
as a matter of fact, some outfits too.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yeah, and Greua was like, this thing is amazing, because
you know, he wanted, as we'll see, he really enjoyed
getting down that river fast and this the dory is
like they won't obviously, because they're made of wood, they
won't bounce off a rock like a raft will. But
they're much more able to be steered, they handle a
lot better, they're much more I don't know if lithe
(10:40):
is the right word, but you can motor down that
river in a dory better than you can in a
raft if you're into speed and churning.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Sure, but a lot of the most of the dory
expeditions use ors their road, right. Oh yeah, So the
other thing about it that you mentioned is that like
it won't handle bumping against rocks like a raft will.
They're much more fragile, much less forgiving than a rubber raft,
which means you have to be that much more experienced
(11:11):
and have that much greater ability to take a dory
down the Colorado River than you would like a raft.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, and you know, they can get dinged up a
little as I kind of thought at first, like you
hit a rock with one of these and you're sinking immediately.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
This explosion catches fire, right.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Exactly, And I'm sure that can happen. But as as
you will see, you know they can. They can get
bumped up a little bit, and you know they're pretty hardy.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I think, yeah, no, for sure, but it's just some
of those rapids can be pretty rough on the old boat.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Grua was in love with dories just like Martin Linton was,
and he came on Linton's company, Green Canyon Dories and
began piloting a dory called the Chattahoochie. He did that
for like ten years down the Colorado River. He made
nearly one hundred trips, which, by my estimation, that's almost
(12:07):
half of the days between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen
seventy nine. When he made those hundred trips he spent
on the Colorado River. That's a lot of time on Colorado.
That's exactly what he wanted to do. He could not
have been happier. He chose this life for himself and
he just did it. He made it work, and he
became an expert on the Colorado River as it runs
(12:29):
through the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Totally like reading this, I got very jealous of his life.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah. I was looking at some of the dory expeditions
they have and I was like, man, that's amazing. Then
it's like eighteen days. I said, no, I'm not going
to do that. Like, are there helicopters that you can
lower in and do a couple of days and then
come out. No, there's not apparently.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Well sadly, there are helicopter trips that they will take
you down and land you on a big plateau. That's
one of the things I learned from that documentary that
Fiderco was in was they were trying to raise awareness
for these you know, they were trying to build some
big like hotel basically like halfway down the canyon, and
all these people were fighting it, seeing like you can't
(13:13):
do that.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
You can't turn this into.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
A place where people can get rich, people can get
helicoptered in and stay in a five star resort.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
Like no, no, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
First of all, I felt like a jackass before. Now
I really feel like a jackass.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
But some of you were talking about getting dropped off
to Row. Sure, like ziplining out like a ranger.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Right, But I mean like walking down from a resort
to go row for a couple of days.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Maybe that's as pretty good.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
But the.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Kind of upshot of what you're saying is a good
analogy from what I understand. To compare rafting or boating
down the Colorado River these days would be like going
on an expedition to Everest. It is nothing like it
used to be. Yeah, even twenty thirty, forty years ago,
it's just gotten so much easier. There's so much money
(14:06):
being thrown at this now, it's just not even a
challenge any longer. It's like a posh vacation for people
who like to act like their adventurers. And I'm saying
that I'm not going to climb Everest, so I can't
really be critical, but I'm saying comparing it to how
it originally started, when these outfits were first created in
(14:27):
like the forties, fifties, sixties, it's just nothing like that today.
It's far more commercialized, I guess, is what I'm trying
to say.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, so in the meme how it started, how it's
going to be a person like bleeding from the head
and spitting a river water out of their mouth, and
then another one with a dude holding a martini as
he goes down the river.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Exactly, all right, I said.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
We took a break, oh yeah, and we come back
and we talk a little bit more about Kenton Grua
the man. All right, as promised, We're going to tell
(15:19):
you a little bit more about the personality of Kent
and Grua. He was quite an adventurer like you said
was just in love with nature, and in particular the
Grand Canyon in that river. His nickname was the Factor.
If you ever read anything you're going to see him,
probably called Kenton the Factor Grua and that was because
apparently he was just like this larger than life personality
(15:42):
and like anytime he was a part of something he
had some sort of influence on it, he was a factor,
and thus the Factor.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Yeah, we'll put he was also very fond of pot
and drinking liquor while he was working on the trail
and after, I guess after rowing for the day, sitting
on a beach, Yeah, you'd probably light up what one
might call it.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Split back then might be a doobie for sure.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
And I'll bet it just gave you a headache instantly.
But he also is a little kind of fashion conscious,
you can say. Anna points out that he would wear
cutoff levies that look cool, especially if you're barefoot and
you have long hair in your stone. But if you're
like falling the water, it takes like a week for
(16:31):
those things to dry out. So long story short, Kent
and Gruel was very frequently chafed on the inside of
his thighs.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Right he was not at all man.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
He was five foot six, but you know, had an
outsized personality and sense of adventure. I guess there was
one story that he was on one expedition and they
drank all the booze, so he hiked all the way
out of the Grand Canyon to go get more booze,
hike back in.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Yeah, that's just one story about Kent and grew, but
it definitely drives the point home. Like he liked booze,
but he was also willing to physically exert himself at
the drop of a hat. So he was a tough
dude essentially, But he was also supposedly really kind and
gentle with the tourists that he took down the river. Yeah,
(17:23):
he was well known for that. But he was also
known for being very opinionated about how the river should
be navigated, how an expedition should be run, and so
he would be more than likely to butt heads with
some of the other river guides that he worked with,
but that didn't rub off toward the passengers, which I
think makes him a pro.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
I'd say, yeah, absolutely, And you know we're going to
build up sort of story wise to the record breaking
river run. But he did some pretty remarkable things before that,
one of which was to hike the entire length of
the Grand Canon from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs.
(18:04):
He read a book in nineteen sixty eight that was
a backpacker named Colin Fletcher who did that hike, well
sort of, we'll see the man who walked through Time
was the book and he said, I'm the first person
to hike the entire link of the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
And Grew was like, no, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
You hiked the canyon within the National Park System. But buddy,
that ain't all of the Grand Canyon.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
The guy went, what.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So I'm going to do it? And he did.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He tried a couple of times, he tried the first time,
and you know, this is two hundred and seventy seven
miles as the crow flies. Yeah, like I mentioned before,
when Faderka did it, they hiked seven hundred and fifty miles.
Because you can't just walk a straight line, there's things
you just can't navigate around, so you're having to hike,
you know, three times as much or at least two
(18:55):
and a half times as much as the length of
the canyon to complete that high.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's a nuts and he did it first time he
tried it. Remember I said he liked to run around
barefoot and cut off Levi's oh, yeah, well this he
realized he was going on a very long hike, so
he went to the trouble of buying himself some leather
moccasins to hi kid. Those lasted very short time before
he started wearing through them and actually cut his foot
on a cactus started to get infected. He's like, I
(19:20):
should probably stop now.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
That surprised me that he would. I mean, that's a mistake.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
I think he knew that that wasn't going to work.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
You know, I don't know that that's true. Like he
was capable of making mistakes, for sure. He's also capable
of evolving his opinions and understandings about things. And he
wasn't so dumb that he kept going until he died, right, Yeah,
you know that was nineteen seventy two, I think. Yeah,
four years later, he's like, I'm going to do this different.
I'm going to not only wear work boots instead of moccasins. Smart,
(19:54):
move out of the gate.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
He scouted the whole route in advanced and supply caches
along the route, so that he could travel as light
as possible, and that's when he set out that second time,
and that's when he was successful. Hiking almost six hundred
miles is the route that he took.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Wow, that is amazing. I think he if you average
it out, he was averaging like almost seventeen mile a
day clip, which is super fast. I mean, when I've
done hikes and I'm really hauling it, if I get
ten miles in a day, that's like a really long,
hard day. And he was in the Grand Canyon, arduous
(20:38):
conditions in the seventies when gear was not like it
is now and averaging close to seventeen miles a day,
which is nuts. It took him thirty six days to
complete the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
I can barely get seventeen miles in a day in
a helicopter, let alone hiking. So yeah, thirty six days
to hike almost six hundred miles. And this is again
it's not a straight line flat like there's up and
down and over and it's what he did was very significant,
and he became the first person on record at least
(21:09):
to have hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon,
not just the National Park, the whole Grand Canyon. And
so whenever you're hearing about people boating through the Grand
Canyon on the Colorado River, what they're talking about is
that same length, the whole geographical Grand Canyon from Lee's
Ferry to Grand Wash cliffs.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Man.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
All right, so let's talk a little bit about that
river run that you just described. You know, from point
to point. The very first expedition down that Colorado River
was by a guy, a Civil War veteran with one arm,
named John Wesley Powell in eighteen sixty nine. It took
ninety eight days at that point and pretty much wrecked
(21:58):
the crew. I mean it was by the time they
got there, they were starving. Was it was a very
very tough ride in eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Can I just say one thing about that expedition, Chuck? Sure,
Three of them, three members of the expedition said nuts
to this, like we're giving up, and set off on
foot and we're never heard from again. And they left
two days before this expedition finally reached its destination. They
just didn't know that they were that close to the end,
(22:26):
and they left and died. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah, that's sad.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, but they were the first Europeans on record to
have circumnavigated the Colorado River through the entire Grand Canyon,
and it was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yeah, that's like the old mine in apocalypse Now. Never
never get off the gd.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Boat, right, the gosh darn boat.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
In the case of apocalypse. Now, it's because there might
be a tiger in the jungle.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Right. So I saw also that this was considered the
last voyage of discovery in North America. It was a
big deal that John Wesley Powllin is his grew did this.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Then in nineteen forty nine there was a guy named
Ed Hudson who was a pharmacist who made a run
in a motor boat. So it was obviously the fastest
at the time at five days and ten minutes. And
then all of a sudden, motor boats and regular boats
started attempting these speed runs. People are trying to, you know,
(23:23):
break previous records. You know, depending on how adventurous you were.
I guess it depends on whether or not you want
to use some motor But obviously the berets are off
to the people who didn't use the motor. Yeah, I'm
sure it was still hard but it ain't like paddling,
you know.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
No, Ed Hudson, a pharmacist in nineteen forty nine, he
did it in like five days and ten minutes using
a motor boat. Jim and Bob Rigg I think two
years later, said nuts to the motor boat. We're going
to not only go down the same path that John
Wesley Powell did in eighteen sixty nine that nearly killed
(24:01):
him without a motor we're going to break Ed Hudson's
motor based record.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
And they did actually, yeah, fifty two hours.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And this was at a time in the fifties when
like a tourist trip, that same tourist trip and a
non motorized boat would be about three weeks. And of
course they're not trying to break a record, they're trying
to show everyone a nice, good time, right exactly, probably
fairly relaxing, so it's not yeah, but some people did
(24:31):
like the slow train. The longest attempt was in seventy three,
and that took one hundred and three days. That's a
little more of my speed, I think.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
So we need to say something about the Colorado River.
As Kent and Grua knew it. He came along in
what was it, nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine, Yeah,
one hundred years exactly after John Wesley Powell Kent and
Grewa came along and took up life on the Colorado
River through the Grand Canyon. But unfortunately for Kent Grewa,
(25:00):
that was six years after the I think the Department
of the Interior created the Glen Canyon Dam, yeah, upstream
of the Grand Canyon in uh on the Colorado River,
and the Colorado River was tamed. That's the best way
to put it. It was up to the I think
the Army Corps of Engineers or whoever runs the dam
(25:21):
there at Glen Canyon to decide how much water the
Colorado River had. And before that it had been considered
the wildest river in America because the snow melt from
the mountains upstream. Depending on how how much it snowed
that year, and then how how much, how high the
(25:42):
temperatures rose, and how quickly they did that spring, that
river could turn wild in an instant because so much
water would come down from the mountains and it would
just flood the Colorado River, including some of the side canyons,
and it would make it nuts. And Kent and Grua
he knew this too, came along after that ceased, and
(26:03):
so now the Colorado was relatively mild.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, Like, if you're going to go down a river
and you want to see how you know, challenging it
might be as a rower, You're going to look at
what's called the gradient in feet per mile, And obviously
the higher the gradient, the more you know, the faster
that water's going to be. A pretty wild river can
(26:28):
have a gradient between twenty five and sixty feet per mile.
The Colorado River has a gradient of eight feet per mile.
So the actual you know, the where the river sits
and the land beneath that river, that gradient isn't too crazy.
It is the steepness of the sides of that canyon
(26:49):
is what makes it crazy. Because, like you said, when
that stuff flash floods and it hits the Colorado River,
it can move boulders, it can create you know, waves,
and when that water hits the still water, it can
create a wave like twenty to thirty feet high.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah, for sure in a river. Yeah. One of the
reasons why stuff like that happens is because all that
debris and boulder create these natural dams on either side
of the river, narrowing the channel, speeding up the water,
and once you have fast water running into slow water,
all sorts of crazy stuff happens. So speaking, geographically, the
Colorado River shouldn't have rapids, but because of its situation
(27:29):
in that stretch of the Grand Canyon, it does. It
has some pretty cool rapids. And Kent and Gruin knew
how to do this, Like his job was to take
people through these rapids down this stream. But again the
river that he was on was not the same river
that John Wesley Powell had been on because of the dam.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah. Absolutely, So you.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Want to talk about the first the first attempt in nineteen.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Eighty, Yeah, I mean successful. A tip makes it sounds
like he didn't do it. He actually did set a
speed record in nineteen eighty I think how fast was
that one?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
He did him forty six hours in fifty six minutes.
He beat Jim and Bob Riggs nineteen fifty one record,
which it stood for almost thirty years.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah, so he breaks the record and you would think,
you know a lot of people would say like, all right,
I did what I attempted to do, broke that record,
But Kit and grew It was like man that river
was was not fast that day, a couple of days,
and I can do this a lot faster. And he
became sort of I don't know about obsessed, if that's
(28:36):
the right word. I don't know if someone who smoked
that much weed can then get that obsessed or worked
up about anything. But he said, I know I can
do this if that like, it doesn't matter how fast
I'm rowing. Unless I have a faster river just from
the natural conditions, then I can't break that record. So
I'm gonna wait until the conditions are right. And that
(28:57):
happened in nineteen eighty three because of El Nino. It
was at the time, at least the most extreme El
Nino that had happened to that point. Caused a ton
of snow. All that snow melts at some point, and
all of a sudden, you're gonna have flooding such that
if you're measuring like a river flow, you measure it
(29:18):
in cubic feet per second. The Colorado River through the
Grand Canyon averages about twelve thousand to fifteen thousand cubic
feet per second, and that summer that June specifically, I
saw anywhere from between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand
cubic feet per second, which is, you know, up seven
(29:40):
to ten times as fast.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, that is a lot more water. Number one, it
goes a lot faster, and it changes the river. Like
the river that he was used to, the rapids, he
was used to the features that he had to circumnavigate
during a normal boating trip down the Colorado. It was
not there. They were different. They were altered by this
(30:02):
huge influx of very fast moving water. And so what
had happened is Kevin Fudarco points out in the Emerald
Mile that for the first time, probably for the only
time in his lifetime, Kent and Grua had a chance
to take on the Colorado River, the same river that
John Wesley Powell took on in eighteen sixty nine. This
(30:25):
stuff did not happen. It caught the corp of engineers
by surprise, so much so that they to keep the
Lake Powell from topping over the Glen Canyon Dam, they
were putting up plywood barriers. That's how unprepared they were
for this incredibly historic flooding. I think there was like
twenty six hundred miles of shoreline in Lake Powell. The
(30:48):
reservoir that's behind the dam, and the reservoir was rising
a foot a day, that's how much snow melt was
coming down, And so they were just releasing. According to
Arizona Central, up to a million cubic feet per second
in a release at a time. So this was flooding
the Colorado downstream. But it's the only option they had
(31:08):
to keep the dam from breaking or from being toppled,
and you know, the water coming out of control. So
it was a wild river again all of a sudden,
like it happened before. And Kent and Grew was all
about that.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
He was all about it.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
So I say, we took a break and then we'll
come back and let everyone know what happened on June
twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Okay, So Kent and Grew says, it's time. Like that
nineteen eighty record that I broke that I'm not very
happy with, I'm now going to break that record. I'm
going to take this river like I know it can
be taken. And he went to his friend Rudy Petschek,
who was at the time forty nine. Kenton would have
been thirty three. Yeah, So Rudy Petchik was like old
(32:15):
and then Steve Wren Reynolds was the other guy that
they they brought on. So the three of them decided
that they were going to take the Emerald Mile out
onto the Colorado River. And they was by the way,
okay Ren, Yeah, okay. And they went to the Park
Service and said, hey, we'd like a permit. We're gonna
(32:36):
take the Emerald Mile down the Colorado River. It's nuts
right now, isn't it. And the Park Service said, no,
you're not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, you got to get a permit to do something
like that. They said, no, Like you said, they were
trying to send people, trying to keep people off the river,
and as we'll see you later on. They even had
a ranger stationed on the river. I guess it was
Benjamin Bratt probably telling people to get out. What you
(33:07):
never saw the River wild.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
No, is that the one with Bruce Willis where he's
a cop in a boat.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Nope?
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
River Wilde was Meryl Streep and David Stratham, Kevin Bacon
and John c Riley.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Isn't Kevin Bacon like a crazy homicidal serial killer is
stalking these guys?
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Not a serial killer. He's a bad guy. Though. Okay,
it's a really good movie. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
But Benjamin Bratt is a ranger that literally does what
this other ranger did is like stationed down before the
bad rapid saying get out.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
You shouldn't be here.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
I just want to shout out my favorite Benjamin Bratt
fact that he was born on Alcatraz during the American
Indian Movement's occupation of Alcatraz.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Did we talk about that?
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Yeah, in our Alcatraz episode?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
And did not remember that?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
Well? Also talk about it in our forthcoming Benjamin Bratt episode.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
We haven't done one on Alcatraz, have we?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yes? Dude, you sure? I believe we did one on
Alcatraz itself. And the escape from.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Alcatraz, Yeah, I do remember escape from Alcatress.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
That escape from Alcatraz one, by the way, was a
good one, all right.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
So he doesn't get the permit, so he goes back
to Martin Litton, his mentor, and he says, hey, man,
you got a lot of pull around here. I'm wondering
if you could help me out, And Linton said, sure,
I'll call up the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent himself,
Richard Marx ks not X. Did we gonna make it
(34:41):
Richard Marx to it?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
No, I just thought it would if it had been
b Richard Marx, like in his life, right before he.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Hit it big, right, and he said, he said, you
know what, it don't mean nothing. And he went, hey,
that's got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, that's right, sign on the dotted line.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
That's a good song, it is. And so Mark said,
all right, here's what I'll do.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
I will call up the rangers out there on the
river tomorrow and I'll get back to you. He didn't
get back to them, and so Litton and Grewubo said,
I guess that means we have permission, right, right, And
so they took off on June twenty fifth, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Yeah, eleven pm they took off. I guess under the
cover of darkness. Maybe that's the only reason I can
think of that they took off so late.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, Or maybe they just timed it so they've finished
at a certain time, or I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
I don't know either, but they did take off just
before midnight.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
That to heat.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Maybe maybe that's a great one. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Anyway,
the fact is this, they were paddling for hours in
pitch darkness because the canyons, the canyon walls of the
Grand Canyon can prevent the sunlight from hitting inside the
canyon at the river level during the day. This was nighttime,
(36:03):
and so the canyon walls were preventing any moonlight from
even getting down. So they were rafting on a river
that was flowing at about ten times its normal rate,
if not more, in the dark without the benefit of
using their eyes. So they were having to like literally
feel the vibrations in the oars to tell what was
(36:24):
coming up in which way they should go during this
nighttime paddling event that they did.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, and I mean to be sure, these were some
of the most experienced people to undertake something like this,
but that is still like it just can't be overstated
what a accomplishment this was.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Just to make it through that first night.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Yeah, especially doing it stoned wearing nothing but cut off levs.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
So they would paddle.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
There were, like I said, three of them, so they
would paddle for about fifteen to twenty minutes at a
time because it's really rigorous, tough stuff that they're doing.
I grew up, went up first and paddled first, and
they would switch off when they would get tired. They
would rest take little cat naps when they could when
they weren't paddling, obviously, and things were going pretty good
(37:13):
for the first few hours, and then they reached a
series of rapids called the Roaring twenties. That is really
tough in particular with all this water, because there's something
in rivers called I would assume people know what and
eddie is, but you might not. Eddie is like a
very calm part of a river, usually off to the
side where the water is flowing back upstream and like
(37:36):
avoid in the current. Usually it's like blocked by a
big rock or something, and it's a good place. Usually
that's where if you want to pull off and you
get out of the boat and get on land, you'll
pull off to a nice little calm eddie. But you
can also have an area where the eddie meets the rapids,
and that's called an eddie fence. I saw it described
(37:57):
as confused water. It doesn't really know which way to go,
so it's going everywhere at once, and it's just really
really unstable water. And these eddy fences were all over
the place, just like not crushing literally but just like
wreaking havoc on their boat in this trip they were taking.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, because the water, the boat's going the direction of
the water, and if the water all of a sudden
is going multiple directions, that gets telegraphed to the boat
and it makes it very difficult to move around, right.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah, But they did get through that part, obviously they did.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And again they're going through the roaring twenties at night
in pitch darkness. JUSTI I just really want to make
sure everybody keeps this in mind. The other thing is
is they were taking these rapids wide open. They weren't
stopping to scout what was ahead and then getting back
in the boat and then taking it with full knowledge
of what was coming up. They just took it as
(38:51):
it came, essentially, Yeah, which is again really nuts considering
that this was not the river that they were used to.
It was the wild, raging version of the river that
they were used. It was like the Colorado on bath salts. Basically,
that's what they were taking on in the dark without
(39:12):
the benefit of eyesight.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, I think steroids is ever used bath salts.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, if you really want to drive the point home,
use bath salts. No, don't actually use basalts. I meant
in your analogy.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, they get through this on you know, experience, on instinct,
like you said, feeling their way. The sun finally comes up.
They're flying down this river. They're going through, you know,
all kinds of crazy rapids, the huge whirlpools, these big
standing waves that talked about that you know, got up
to twenty feet. I think one of the guys even
(39:46):
said pet Chick said some of them were like three
stories high. Yeah, at times. And they finally get to
Crystal Rapid, which is at mile ninety eight, and they
were worn out, like super super tired obviously. And that
is where Benjamin Bratt was stationed. Yeah, park ranger Benjamin Bratt,
(40:07):
and he said, hey, you shouldn't be paddling through here.
And also I was born on Alcatraz.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
That's a great Benjamin Bratt in person.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Uh No, he was stationed there to get if there
were any tourist boats that you know, had somehow already
been on the water, which they shouldn't have been to
begin with, because they were denying permits.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah. I didn't understand that part, you know.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I guess they were just there were some already out there,
maybe because especially if some of them were taking three weeks.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Oh got, they didn't want to ruin people's vacation.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Maybe, but they were Basically he was there basically to say, hey,
pull over, all of you tourists, get out and hike
out and boat captain and whoever else you're gonna have
to take this thing down the rest of the way,
like by yourself.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, I hope you don't like company because ts for you.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Uh, that's right. But what happened with this group.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
So they didn't what. One of the things that caused
Benjamin Bratt to be stationed there was that a commercial
rafting outfit had gotten overturned. One of the boats had
been overturned at this under normal circumstances, very tough rapid
called crystal rapids, and one person had died. I believe
(41:18):
a passenger had died. This happened like eleven hours before
the Kent and Grew and his group came along in
the Emerald Mile. They were totally out of contact with everybody,
so they had no idea this happened. And so the
reason Benjamin Bratt was there was because it was so
dangerous what they were coming up on that. Literally, their
(41:40):
lives were in danger. So when they came upon the
park ranger, Benjamin Bratt, they pretended they didn't see him.
What was cool is.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Look over there on the right, guys.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Exactly what was cool about it is that this park
ranger had been a river guide himself. He immediately recognized
two was in this boat, and he pretended he didn't
see them. Yeah, so that everybody could just kind of
go their own way and just pretend like they hadn't
seen one another, and these guys could continue on because
he said he knew immediately what they were doing because
(42:12):
of the river conditions, so he just let him go
their way. He kept an eye on them as they
went further along, though, and hit that crystal rapid and
he witnessed their boat being overturned very violently.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, this is when they hit one of those the
one that Petchick said was two to three stories high,
fliped that thing at the top. Everyone ends up in
the water. Kent and Greua was pretty okay and Petchick
was pretty okay. The boat got banged up a little bit.
I think it lost some of its bowel post, a
(42:46):
chunk out of the stern but it was still very
much operational, and Reynolds was injured. I think there was
a head injury, and as a result, he did not
do a lot of at least tough rowing after that,
he did anything at all. I figure he'd be like
Burt Reynolds in Deliverance at that point, just sort of
laying down in the middle of the canoe. But he
(43:08):
apparently would row some calmer parts. And I guess take
that with a grain of salts, because I don't think
any of it was very calm and grew and Petchick said,
all right, it's the two of us basically doing the tough,
tough rowing in one hundred degree heat, and it was.
It was real tough stuff from that point on. It
(43:29):
was already tough, but it was really really tough. But
they decided not to quit.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
No, they didn't, and that's really significant because again their
boat overturned. They Reynolds was injured, they were thrown out
of the boat violently into a whirlpool, got sucked under.
All three of them miraculously got free and then they
had to turn the boat back over upright again get
back in it. Totally exhausted at this point and decided
(43:54):
to continue on. They did that was just absolutely nuts.
Problem is is they knew the park ranger had seen them,
and so they were kind of all worried about possibly
losing their river guide licenses because again, this was a
wildcat river run. It was not sanctioned, it was technically illegal.
But they continued on. They said, we've made it this far,
(44:15):
and they kept going and gave themselves I guess a
period where they're like, okay, this is not working anymore.
We're all too exhausted. We need to take some rest.
Let's just take an hour and we'll all get some sleep,
and then we'll wake up and be refreshed and it'll
be like starting over again and new.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
And of course what happens is they sleep for three hours,
almost woke up in a panic because they had just
you know, almost killed themselves. They're exhausted, and now they're
thinking like, now we've jeopardized this record that we're trying
to get. We don't know if the river will ever
be this fast again, right, and here we slept for
three hours. So instead of taking their ball and going home,
(44:58):
taking their ore and going home, they said, now we
got to go extra fast. So at mile two thirty nine,
they get out another set of ores and someone said,
where did those even come from? And Grewa said, they
were at our feet the whole time. Dumb, dumb, And
they started rowing two at a time, so they were
(45:19):
hauling but rowing together, which obviously, you know, I don't
know if that probably doesn't double your speed, but you're
you're going much faster at that point.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah, so that was They woke up at I guess
about one, because they took that rest at ten and
accidentally slept for three hours, so actually, yeah one, I
had to count it out on my fingers for a second.
And then they kept rowing and they another ten hours
later they finally reached the end, so that like they
(45:50):
had just been exerting themselves almost constantly for thirty six
hours and thirty eight minutes. That's what their final time
ended up being. So they just destroy Grewa's previous record
setting run thanks to the river being so nuts.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, he did it. The three of them did it
rather and he did not lose his license. He was
worried about that, so that's the good news. Apparently he
got a five hundred dollars fine, which he couldn't even pay,
so his lawyer negotiated community service, which he may or
may not have even done. And like you said, at
the very beginning of this, he wasn't a big braggart
(46:28):
about his own accomplishments. They kind of spoke for themselves
to him. Yeah, for sure, So he didn't really you know,
it's not like he started making the talk show circuit
or anything like that. But of course word was going
to get out people talk, and he you know, he
will always remain a legend of the Grand Canyon and
the Colorado River because of the speed run.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yeah. He died at fifty two in two thousand and two,
and he died while he was riding his mountain bike.
And I couldn't find out how. It's like that sounds
like he went over a cliff or something. Apparently he
had torn aorta somehow. They're not sure how, but he
was found laying beside his mountain bike dead and his
wife at his I believe his third wife, Michelle Grewa,
(47:12):
said this is exactly how he would have wanted to go.
So yeah, I mean, if you're going to be like
a rugged outdoorsman and you die on your mountain bike,
that's not the worst way you could go.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
No, they you know, it seemed like he was he
was just sort of laying there on his side, and
they said it looked like sort of a peaceful position.
So there there is speculation that he may have sort
of known what was going on and just sort of
laid down and you know, to be with the woods.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Right, to be with the woods. That's the new euphemism
for it, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (47:46):
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (47:47):
Michelle Grew also wrote in a memorial Boatman's Quarterly, I
think that he had mellowed out some a lot actually
in his later years. Still lived the life that he lived,
but he became focused on being a dad. I think
he had three or has three kids, and it was just,
from what I can tell, an all round interesting neat dude.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
Yeah. I mean he started a conservation group, didn't he.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
He did called the Grand Canyon River Guides, that's right,
which is still around today, and that Grand Canyon Dories
was sold to an existing outfit called Oars, which gives
dory tours down the Grand Canyon still today.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Tempting.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
It tempted me too, and then I was like, again,
seventeen days is a little much and also do I
want to perish in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River?
And I decided, now I don't.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
He could just be with the woods.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
I'd just rather stay locked inside my house. Right, You
got anything else?
Speaker 3 (48:53):
No, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I just know that that's one place you will not
crash a dory into a boulder is in your house.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
It's definitely not.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well, since I said definitely not, that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Uh oh, this is cool.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
This is from someone who whose grandmother had a nice
little what do you call them?
Speaker 3 (49:16):
A mnemonic device?
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Yeah, for when you want to remember.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Something mnemonic you're thinking's a pneumatic no nomonic.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Hey, guys, stuff you should know as a staple of
my daily commute. Truly enjoy learning about common and obscure stuff.
And you've helped our trivia team, the Meerkats, claim victory
on more than one occasion.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Go Meerkats for sure.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Anyway, just finished the episode on the Wreck of the
Coast to Concordia and thought i'd share the way that
my grandmother taught me how to remember which direction was
port versus starboard. She would say, there's not much port
left in the glass like port whye y port side
being left port left in the glass. Interestingly, she was
(50:02):
not a seafaring woman nor a.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
Lover of port.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I wish I could recall the context of her telling
me this even but it's always stuck with me. And
I thought you might get a kick out of that.
Thanks for all the information and laughs. And that is
from Aaron. And I wrote Aeron back to see if
I could get report No grandma's name, but I didn't
hear back. So let's just let's just say grandmother to Aaron,
(50:27):
okay inntribute?
Speaker 1 (50:29):
Yeah, and that's it. Okay. Is that Aaron with the
A A or Aaron with the E E R? I am, oh,
thanks a lot, Aaron. That's a good one. It's at
least as good as mine that I came up with.
Speaker 3 (50:45):
But what was yours?
Speaker 1 (50:47):
There's four letters in both port and left.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
I think, Oh, think that's what it's good too.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
That's how that's what I remember. So apparently the system works.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Well, if you want to be like Aaron and improve
or try to improve upon our devices, we love that
kind of thing. You can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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